Monday, November 12, 2012

Slashdot Descriptors Feature For Stack Overflow

You probably already know about Stack Overflow, a mostly nice Q&A site. There are still some problems with it, in my experience.

One problem is getting down-voted without explanation. Has happened to me lots of times, so you get used to it, you even expect it (without submitting knowingly bad questions, to be clear). But it's still confusing.

There is a solution, that would help at least some: down-vote buttons should be categorized. We know and love this feature on Slashdot: moderation descriptors. The complete list seems to be: normal, offtopic, flamebait, troll, redundant, insightful, interesting, informative, funny, overrated, or underrated (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot).


The negative ones are: offtopicflamebaittrollredundantoverrated. 

The positive ones are: insightfulinterestinginformativefunnyunderrated.

I haven't thought up good descriptors for Stack Overflow, but why not reuse the canned answers used when a question is considered so bad that it gets deleted? Maybe: 'unclear', 'shopping-list', 'clearly-homework', 'submitter-should-have-tried-harder', et cetera.





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